She had no idea how serious her head wound was

Dr. Frank Scheuermeyer (right) and Dr. Devin Harris carry out urgent repairs on Heather Agnew’s head. ‘That’s lethal if you leave that untreated,’ Scheuemeyer said of Agnew’s head wound. Later, Agnew was basking in the success of her treatment (below).Photo by
Jason Payne

Heather Agnew is holding a bloody towel to her head as a neighbour helps her into St. Paul’s emergency. Agnew, 55, has a cut in her scalp from a fall, but doesn’t appear to be in danger.

In fact, Agnew will probably die without prompt surgery.

Within minutes, she’s in a trauma room, encircled by doctors and nurses as a surgeon begins to repair two torn arteries, one of which is spraying his face shield with blood.

Agnew had hit her head on the corner of a wooden recycling box in the lobby of her West End apartment building. Her neighbour, who’d been holding the elevator door for her, told her she needed to get to the hospital. Likely, he saved her life — she may well have bled to death if she hadn’t accepted the man’s offer of a ride to St. Paul’s.

Emergency department manager David Brown, in 2002, was on his last shift as a St. Paul’s emergency nurse when the triage nurse said, “Someone’s having a baby.”

Brown looked toward a nearby washroom. Through the door, wedged open by a wheelchair, he could see a crack-addicted prostitute.

“There she was with one foot up on the sink screaming, ‘Get this baby out of me!’” Brown recalls. “I thought, ‘Oh my god, she’s going to have this baby any second,’ and then she did. I had visions of this baby just dropping to the floor. So I grabbed it.

“I’ve got this baby’s leg and arm and I’m shaking it . . . to make it scream.”

The newborn, “a cute little thing,” became a ward of the province, Brown says.

While large events such as the Celebration of Light fireworks and concerts typically result in a deluge of patients suffering from fight injuries, it was the fallout from a Rolling Stones concert a few years ago that emergency nurse Norma Missio remembers best. “It was so hilarious, because it was like, ‘This is the third 52-year-old guy who had a drink and smoked a joint then collapsed,’” Missio says.

Tragedies, too, have left an impression. When a young man who overdosed while celebrating his graduation was declared beyond help, Missio was the one who — as the grieving family watched ­— turned off the intravenous drip and the ventilator that were keeping him alive.

“He was starting out, and he was gone,” Missio says. “I have three sons and I have five grandchildren and I just looked at him and thought, ‘This could’ve been my kid.’”

Staff stay “task-oriented” when trying to revive a faltering patient, but afterward, emotion may creep in. “You see a young person and they’re stabbed, and dead — that’s just a terrible loss,” says Dr. Joe Finkler. “When the family comes in and there’s a death or a terrible outcome, I feel really bad, as you would with a member of your own family.”

Of course, when it comes to the trials and tribulations of the emergency room, staff agree the stories most people want to hear concern unusual objects stuck in orifices.

“The stuff that people hear in rumours is absolutely true,” nurse Missio says. “It happens all the time. If you could put it in there, people have done that. There’s no point in trying to understand why. There’s all sorts of things — bottles, pieces of fruit. Generally it’s a foreign body in the rectum. I think there’s a triage code for that.”

Yup, that would be code GI101, not to be confused with GU132, which describes a different type of mishap, typified by a patient brought in nearly 20 years ago.

“She was running naked at lunchtime in a fairly well-known downtown restaurant,” remembers emergency nurse Laurie Fraser. “She had a rat in her hoo-hoo.”

One man came in with a household decoration where it wasn’t meant to be. His explanation for the code GI101? “Slipped while dusting.” Another man with a similar problem that arose while his wife was away required surgery, and would have to explain to his beloved why he was fine on Friday but had a colostomy bag by Sunday.

In such an unpredictable, stressful environment, one might expect staff to enjoy the quiet times, perhaps a night shift in the diagnostic treatment unit for stable patients who need a bed but little else.

I shudder to think how much taxpayers’ money is being spent to defend Premier John Horgan and ...

Vancouver Flyers

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